From 2028 onwards, the world’s most celebrated stage for women’s sports will slam its door on many women who once dreamed of standing under its light. Just today, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) released a new “Policy on the Protection of the Female  (Women’s) Category,” which bars all trans women and most athletes with XY differences in sex development (DSD) from competing in the women’s division and subjects women to mandatory genetic testing to prove that they are “biological females.”

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Framed as a neutral defense of “fairness, safety and integrity” in sport, the policy revives forms of genetic sex testing that the IOC itself once abandoned, ignores the complexity of bodies and performance, and treats a small, already marginalized group of athletes as acceptable collateral damage. If we read the policy closely, its scientific claims are shaky, its ethical commitments inconsistent, and its vision of women’s sports disturbingly narrow. That is why I have compiled a 10-point criticism that challenges the policy’s core claims:

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1. Invoking “science” without showing any

The IOC assures us that the ban is “based on the scientific understanding” (p.4) of sex and performance. Yet, the document cites no primary studies, offers no review of the evidence base, and never explains how conflicting findings were weighed. We are told a working group of unnamed “specialists” (p.2) reached consensus, but the IOC does not disclose who they are, what methods they used, or whether athletes most affected by the policy—trans women and intersex women—were meaningfully represented. “Science” here functions less as evidence than as a rhetorical shield for a predetermined political outcome. (See Joanna Harper’s earlier call out on World Rugby’s foregone conclusion on trans women’s participation)

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2. The myth that male advantage is universal across “all sports”

The policy’s central claim is blunt: “male sex… confers performance advantage in all sports and events that rely on strength, power, and/or endurance,” (p.2), treating this as a universal premise to justify categorical exclusion. Yet, performance differences between men and women vary by sport. In shooting, for example—where success depends on arm strength, muscular endurance, core stability, and fine motor control—women have historically out-shot men at elite levels, including in mixed Olympic competition. After Chinese shooter Zhang Shan won gold in the open skeet event at the 1992 Games, the International Shooting Union responded by introducing a separate women’s division, a move widely read as protecting the “integrity” of men’s dominance rather than safeguarding women’s opportunities.

 

3. A confused definition of “biological sex”

The policy begins by noting that sex is identified through a combination of “chromosomes, gonads, and hormones.” (p.2) When it comes to eligibility, that nuance disappears: access to the women’s category hinges overwhelmingly on a single genetic marker—the SRY gene—while the fairness rationale leans heavily on testosterone, as if chromosome status, hormone levels, and actual androgen sensitivity were interchangeable. This produces a deeply inconsistent hypothesis. XY women with some degree of androgen insensitivity are treated as having a “male” advantage simply because their testosterone is high, while XX women with naturally elevated testosterone from conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome or congenital adrenal hyperplasia are presumed to be competing “fairly” because they lack a Y chromosome. The contradiction lies not with these XX athletes, but with a policy that claims to police “excess” testosterone in the women’s field while, in practice, deploying that concern almost exclusively to eradicate trans women and XY-DSD women from the category.

 

4. Repeating the failures of chromosome testing the IOC already abandoned

Chromosome-based sex testing is not new; it was tried and dropped. In the 1990s, the IOC used genetic screening at the Atlanta Games, where eight of 3,387 women “failed” the test—mostly due to complete or partial androgen insensitivity. All were eventually cleared to compete as women, and the IOC’s own commission concluded that the tests were costly, stigmatizing, and scientifically unjustified. By re-centering SRY gene testing today, the IOC is repeating a failed experiment while pretending that history never happened.

 

5. SRY testing is neither “highly accurate” nor minimally intrusive

The new policy describes the SRY test as “most accurate and least intrusive” (p.2) because it can be done via cheek swab, saliva sample, or blood draw. Yet, SRY status tells us nothing about how an athlete’s body actually responds to androgens, whether they have androgen-insensitive syndrome (AIS), or how their physiology has developed over a lifetime. Athletes who might qualify as “exceptions”—for example, women with complete AIS— are then pushed into

 “invasive assessment of reproductive system characteristics like distribution of body hair, depth of voice, breast and clitoris size, and… having to reveal life-changing personal information”. Calling such a system “least intrusive”, rather than “highly questionable in ethical terms”, is disingenuous.

 

​6. The “testosterone gap” is not a clean line

To justify treating XY women as inherently unfair, the IOC insists that adult male and female testosterone levels “do not overlap.” (p.2) Yet, as Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young note, only two large-scale studies of testosterone in elite athletes exist, and they reach conflicting conclusions about whether such a sex gap actually appears. In the GH-2000 study of 446 men and 234 women across 15 Olympic sports, researchers found clear overlap between men’s and women’s testosterone: 13.7% of women had values above the typical female range and 4.7% fell in the typical male range, while 16.5% of men were below the typical male range and 1.8% were in the female reference range.

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A later IAAF study of 849 elite women at the 2011 World Championships reported far fewer high-T women, but it did so by excluding women with known DSD from the reference sample, effectively defining them out of “normal” female variation rather than demonstrating a natural gap. If all women with naturally high testosterone are included, the data again reveal overlap between the sexes, exposing the policy’s supposed “sex gap” as a product of selective sampling, not settled science.

 

7. ​Turning XY-DSD and trans women into invented threats

The policy claims that “the majority” of XY-DSD athletes and XY trans women are androgen-sensitive and retain “male-typical” advantages (p.3), but offers no actual data. The clearest real-world data we have from past Olympic testing shows that many SRY-positive women discovered through old sex-verification regimes had partial or complete AIS and did not dominate women’s events, which is precisely why they were eventually allowed to compete. In other words, the IOC leans on hypothetical, unquantified risk to justify certain exclusions, while downplaying documented cases where XY women posed no discernible threat to “fairness” at all. This is not evidence-based regulation; it is a premeditated political project designed to manufacture “risk” and fear in order to justify excluding “biological males” from women’s sports.

 

8. A vague “other rare DSD” category invites arbitrary exclusion

The policy carves out an exception for CAIS and “other rare XY DSDs that do not benefit from the anabolic effects of testosterone,”(p.3) but fails to define which diagnoses qualify, what evidence is required, or how partial androgen resistance will be treated. Without clear criteria, eligibility becomes a matter of discretionary expert judgment behind closed doors. The IOC can present its policy as compassionate while keeping a free hand to exclude most intersex women in practice.​

 

9. Female Athlete “consensus” is overstated

The IOC claims to have identified a “broad consensus” (p.4) among women athletes in favor of restricting the category to “biological females,” citing an internal survey that has never been released. Independent, peer-reviewed work tells a different story. A 2024 survey of world-class, elite, and national-level athletes in the female category found that while many support some sex-based structuring, over 80% believed sports federations should be doing more to include transgender athletes, and support for trans women inclusion was significantly higher in precision and lower-contact sports. Even the authors of the study stress that athletes’ concerns are rooted in fair competition and long-standing gender inequities in sports, not blanket hostility to trans people. By flattening these nuances into a single “consensus,” the IOC uses athletes’ voices as cover for a sweeping exclusion they did not collectively demand.

 

10.The “open category” is a second-class route

Finally, the IOC portrays its policy as inclusive because SRY-positive women can still compete in the men’s or “open” categories (p.6), as if these were equivalent alternatives. In reality, there is no meaningful, resourced open category on the Olympic program, and the policy offers no guarantee that open events will exist, be funded, or carry equal prestige. For trans women and many intersex women, being shunted into an open or men’s division where they have no realistic pathway to success is not inclusion but segregation.

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​At the very moment when global sport could be expanding possibilities for women in all their diversity, the IOC has instead chosen to tighten control over their bodies and stoke panic about a tiny group of athletes. In doing so, it aligns itself with a broader wave of anti-trans legislation and culture-war rhetoric—from Trump’s anti-trans executive orders to the Indian parliament’s recent trans amendment bills- that treats trans athletes as problems to be contained and policed. A policy built on fear-mongering and the manufactured specter of “biological males” invading women’s sport will not stand the test of time.

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March 26,2026

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